Death in Nineteenth-Century British Literature | Andrew Sanders (essay date 1982)
Andrew Sanders (essay date 1982)
SOURCE: "They Dies Everywhere . . . ," in Charles Dickens Resurrectionist, The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1982, pp.1-36.
[In the following essay, Sanders examines Charles Dickens ' portrayals of death and of deathbed scenes and asserts that they reflect both Victorian fascination with death and concern about the very high mortality rate of urban-dwellers in the nineteenth century.]
Andrew Sanders on Dickens:
The prevalence of death in [Dickens'] fiction reflected a familiar enough reality to his readers; he neither killed characters for the market . . . nor for fictional convenience. . . . Dickens wrote of dying children because so many nineteenth-century families, including his own] [lost children in infancy; he described pious adult death] beds because he had attended them; he expressed grief at the loss of fictional characters because he so sorely felt the loss of...
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